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Plenty of accomplished female actors have performed in rom-coms. Usually, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an cinematic masterpiece as has ever been made. However, concurrently, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched intense dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane dated previously before production, and stayed good friends until her passing; during conversations, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with funny romances as merely exuding appeal – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has plenty of gags, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in U.S. romantic comedies, embodying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. On the contrary, she fuses and merges traits from both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (even though only just one drives). The banter is fast, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton navigating her nervousness before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that tone in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while operating the car carelessly through city avenues. Later, she centers herself performing the song in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

This is not evidence of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to try drugs, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means focused on dying). At first, the character may look like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she is the love interest in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward either changing enough to suit each other. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – without quite emulating her final autonomy.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, became a model for the style. Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in Father of the Bride, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even in her comeback with Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses drawn nearer by funny detective work – and she fits the character easily, beautifully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romances where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making such films as recently as last year, a constant multiplex presence. Now fans are turning from expecting her roles to understanding the huge impact she was on the funny romance as we know it. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of such actresses who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s rare for a performer of her caliber to commit herself to a style that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a long time.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s unusual for a single part to originate in a romantic comedy, not to mention multiple, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her